Plant–animal mutualism in biological markets: Evolutionary and ecological dynamics driven by non-heritable phenotypic variance

Mutualism between plants and animals, such as in pollination and seed dispersal, is a fundamental mechanism facilitating the productivity and biodiversity of ecosystems, and it is often considered as an analog of a free-market economy. The coevolution of plant reward and animal choosiness, however, involves an apparent paradox due to incomplete information and limited mutation rates: plant rewards evolve only when animals are choosy, but choosy animals purge the heritable variations of plants, which then favors less choosy animals. Here we use a two-species mathematical model to illustrate how non-heritable phenotypic variances of plants may facilitate the coevolution of rewards and choosiness and solve the paradox with low mutation rates. We simultaneously track the ecological and evolutionary dynamics and show that the population ratio links the two processes and tunes the stable eco-evolutionary equilibrium. Numerical simulations confirm the analytic prediction with varying mutation rates (heritable variance). The efficiency of a biological market is generally suboptimal due to the information constraint and individual competition.